28 Years Later…

Laura and I braved the crowds and saw Revenge of the Sith last night.

I could go into detail here about how seeing Star Wars with my Dad for my 8th birthday literally made me who I am today, determining my tastes, my attitudes and my chosen profession….but I’m not going to bother.

My three word review of Episode III:

By.

The.

Numbers.

Or, to give it slightly more attention: Neither better nor worse than Phantom Menace or Attack of the Clones — the same combination of occasionally nifty with cringe-worthy, laughably bad. In general, the whole thing felt like 2 hours and 30 minutes of watching Lucas knock over the expected plot pins he had set in the previous films, one by one…some with more success than others. A solid C+.

The one thing I took away from the experience is this: Bernard Cornwell said that he wrote the Sharpe series of novels because he was bummed that there were no more Hornblower books for him to enjoy. Lucas has said that he made the original Star Wars as an amalgam of those things from his childhood that he enjoyed (serial space opera cliffhangers, etc.), because they weren’t being made any more. It is obvious to me that the internal mythology that my generation built up around Star Wars is cooler than Lucas’ latter-day attempts, and yet for the most part, we have sat back and let him continue, rather than creating something ourselves. We’ve taken the passenger seat, perhaps longer than we should have. One of us needs to create something to fill the vacuum that we perceive….something that speaks to the things we loved that aren’t being made any more.

…and it might as well be me.